Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book is attractive and engaging. However, in some places, it is sloppy, and in others just plain incorrect: 1) Skin does not wrinkle due to water seeping into skin: it's actually a nervous system response (people with reattached digits do not have wrinkly skin). This is a fairly recent, cool discovery, so I'll give them a pass on getting this wrong. 2) "Why do I have dreams and nightmares?": the answer given is that your brain is still active and makes movies of a jumble of experiences. The brain is active all night, but dreams only part of the night. There are various hypotheses for the reasons dreaming happens (i.e., to help organize thoughts), but as far as I know there is no consensus on the answer yet. It IS clear, however, that it's not a simple consequence of the brain being active. 3) There's a diagram accompanying a discussion of how toilets work (explanation given is gravity moving waste out of the home). There's a cross section of a house with pipes, and a red arrow shown going down from the level of the toilet out. However, the only pipes shown are inflow pipes (water leading to a hose, faucets, shower, etc): the outflow pipes (drains, bottom of toilet, etc.) aren't shown. The diagram implies that water flushed out a toilet ends up in your garden hose. 4) "Some dinosaurs could fly and some could swim": Pterosaurs could fly, mosasaurs and plesiosaurs could swim, but these weren't dinosaurs (but it's a common mistake, one worth being careful not to perpetuate). Birds are a kind of dinosaur, and some of them can obviously fly and swim, but readers aren't going to think of birds, they're going to think of pterosaurs. It seems the author did, too, as one of the facts is that people did not live at the same time as dinosaurs: this is true if we think of dinosaurs as things like T-rex, stegosaurus, etc. and exclude birds (63 MY gap between humans and the last non-avian dino) but not if birds are included. 5) "The shape of a boat helps the water push back with enough force to keep the boat up": Buoyancy isn't primarily about shape, it's about density: the ship sinks, pushing aside water, until the mass of the water displaced equals the mass of the ship (roughly; changing water pressure does matter). Why not focus on that? 6) "Why do cats purr? Scientists are not sure why cats purr, but they all do. Some people think purring might be a way for cats to heal themselves. Purring makes a rumble in their bodies. The rumble might help their bones grow and heal." It's a good idea to highlight that for some questions science hasn't figured out answers yet. Too often science is portrayed as a list of facts, rather than correctly as the process of discovery and testing that has the effect of getting these facts. But then why include a crackpot theory as a potential explanation? I had trouble finding any evidence of this in the scientific literature: the only thing somewhat close was a commentary in Scientific American that listed this as a possibility, but with no citations to any scientific literature. If this were a reasonable idea, we'd probably see many animals doing it, and it's simple enough to study (measure rates of bone growth with and without exposure to purring) and with a big enough potential impact (purring devices to stick in casts, for example) that it would have been resolved, or at least the subject of studies. Nope. 7) "Snow looks white to us because white sunlight bounces off snow". Well, sure. Red taillights and green lasers bounce off snow, too -- does this mean it's also red and green? White objects reflect all (or at least enough) colors of visible light, whereas other colored objects reflect a narrower range. Instead, we get a vague response that doesn't generalize: do red objects reflect red light (yes), do black objects reflect black light (no). This isn't due to simplifying for children: I've read many science children's books with my kids that very effectively communicate this principle (it could have been done here by just saying "white reflects all the colors of light we can see" rather than "white reflects white light"). You get the gist. Many of the facts in the book are correct, but there are enough problems with the science content that I'd suggest looking elsewhere. I expected better from National Geographic.